Viral 5.4
THE GARDEN
By John Stevenson

When offered the chance to write about a haiku I admire, it seemed as if every haiku I’ve ever read vanished from my memory. I knew that I could pick up almost any issue of the journals to which I subscribe or any of the haiku anthologies and find poems that would inspire admiration. But I decided that it would be more interesting to wait and see what poems came to me spontaneously, in their own good time. Ruth Yarrow’s was the first to arrive in this way.

The poem speaks for itself. I shall now proceed to gild the lily.

The poem says that, after the garden party, there is / was / will be the garden.

Viewed as experience—a party at 27 Sycamore Street—it might suggest that of a hostess, or a child of the household, a neighbor, or a gardener, caterer, or a musician packing his instrument.

It could be that of a guest who has returned in search of something lost or misplaced. The list can go on in this fashion until overtaken by exhaustion. In a similar vein, each of these observers has a range of potential responses to this encounter with a post-party garden and each of those responses may be in the form of thought, intuition, and/or visceral reflexes involving memory, present experience, or anticipation. So, for each trunk there are branches and for each branch there are twigs and leaves of potential experience and attending resonance. And yet the thing is so simple.

Alternatively, the poem could be looked upon as projecting a scene without a human participant, without a self as witness—after the expulsion from Eden, what is Eden? After one’s own death, what is the life that goes on in this world? The garden behind 27 Sycamore Street might be contemplated for an instant as a strange place, that is, a new place. What is it then? Not “what is it like” but what is it?

Or the poem might be about words. It contains six of them, two of which are repetitions. Iteration, inflection, and seasoning. It might be about words, words, words.

I believe in the twenty-seven ways. There are more than twice as many ways of looking at a haiku as there are of looking at a blackbird. Each of them is a way in which a haiku might be an effective poem and none of them is THE way.

One of the ways that I enjoy looking at a haiku is to notice how it embodies a correspondence between things depicted (there and then) and my experience as a reader (here and now). These “Virals” columns, like all of our discourse on haiku, are a virtual party. They can be great fun. They can be something to dread. They can be a social vehicle of career advancement.

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Virals is a section in which one person choses a haiku by another person and comments on that haiku. Then the author of that haiku is invited to select a haiku by someone else and comment on that poem, and so on. For an introduction to this section, see Virals.

• Viral 5.1 (Metz ➾ Lyles)
• Viral 5.2 (Lyles ➾ Chang)
• Viral 5.3 (Chang ➾ Stevenson)
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